A quilt with swastikas creates controversy

A museum in Greeley, Colorado, has generated a firestorm of controversy by accepting a quilt whose principle design element is a series of swastikas:

For almost 80 years the pretty quilt, hand-stitched from scraps of old farm clothes and backed with fabric from flour sacks bought at a local mill, had been forgotten at the bottom of a family trunk.

Then one day two summers ago, an elderly couple walked into a local museum, shyly offering up the surprisingly well-preserved quilt for sale. The 90-year-old man, who had lived his whole life on the flat plains an hour north of Denver, was divvying up family heirlooms when he found the mysterious quilt.

The man didn't remember seeing the quilt before and wasn't sure who made it. His mother and sister had been avid quilters, as had so many women of his childhood. Maybe they made it together and it was tucked away when his mother died in 1934. His sister was also dead, so there was no one left to ask...

"Our mission is to preserve and interpret the history of Greeley. This is a cultural artifact," said Erin Quinn, museum director. Greeley was founded in 1870 as a utopian community, with strict covenants requiring temperance and modest living. Quinn can imagine women only a generation or two removed from the city's founders gathering to socialize and make something functional.

The bent-arm cross was once a popular pattern in frontier quilting circles and given many names, including Catch Me If You Can and Whirligig. Quinn's best guess, based on the history of the flour mill in town, is that the quilt was made in the late 1910s or the 1920s — long before most in the region knew what was brewing an ocean away in Europe...

The word "swastika" is believed to come from Sanskrit, and roughly translates as "to do good." The design has been used as a fertility symbol as well as an emblem of good luck and good fortune. It has turned up on Neolithic rock carvings, in Hindu temples and amid Greek ruins, and was once widely incorporated in Native American jewelry and handicrafts — so much so that Arizona in the 1920s used it on highway signs...

Local reaction was swift, extreme and more than a little unsettling. One person called for the museum to burn the quilt; others chided curators for even considering displaying it.

You can read more about the quilt and the controversy at the Los Angeles Times link.

Photo: Craig F. Walker / The Denver Post, via the Denver Post.